model

In this post on the methods blog Rich FitzJohn and I describe the key technologies used to build our recently published package for R called plant – an individual-based simulation model that simulates the growth of individual trees, stands of competing plants, or entire metacommunities under a disturbance regime, using common physiological rules and trait-based functional trade-offs to capture differences among species. Link: https://methodsblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/plant/

Our latest paper describes an R package called plant – an individual-based simulation model that simulates the growth of individual trees, stands of competing plants, or entire metacommunities under a disturbance regime, using common physiological rules and trait-based functional trade-offs to capture differences among species. Falster DS, FitzJohn RG, Brännström Å, Dieckmann U, Westoby M (2016) plant: A package for modelling forest trait ecology & evolution. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 7: 136-146.

The purpose of this post is to consider how researchers using process-based models can best describe their methods, assuming that a given base model may be used in a series of papers. A common situation in the current literature is that a full description of any particular model is given in the first paper where it is used, and then in subsequent papers we say something like “For full details of the model see Falster et al (2011).

This post previous appeared here UPDATE (2020.01.20): The most recent release of the TRY database has been released with an open source license (CC-BY). Great news!!! In the first week of September 2013, members of the TRY trait database consortium are meeting to discuss the future of TRY, including whether TRY should revise their model of data sharing. TRY is a community initiative aiming to Provide a global archive of plant traits, and Promote trait-based approaches in ecology and biodiversity science.